"RACE" IN EUROPE
a melting-pot. The Japanese are also a mixture of several ethnic
types. India is as much a product of repeated immigration as Britain^
and so on throughout the peoples of the earth.
In Germany to-day, in order to establish " Aryan blood/5 a man
must present a pedigree clear of "non-Aryan/' i.e. Jewish, elements
for several generations back. The enormous number of cases in which
one parent or grandparent or great-grandparent of the most thor-
oughly "German55 citizens has proved to be Jewish shows how im-
possible it is to secure a "pure Nordic stock.59 Once more, indeed,
the social and cultural plane is the more important. Germany has
benefited a great deal from her Jewish elementsówe need only
think of Heine, Haber, Mendelssohn, Einstein. But during the eco-
nomic depression the competition of Jews in the professions, in finance,
and in retail trade was proving embarrassing, and in the revolution
it was convenient to treat the Jews as a collective scapegoat, who
could be blamed for mistakes, and on whom might be vented the
anger that must be restrained against external enemies.
It is instructive to compare the treatment of the Jews in Germany
with that of the "Kulaks53 (that is, well-to-do peasants) in Russia.
The Kulaks, by standing in the way of rural collectivization, were an
obstacle to the Government's economic plans: they also provided
a convenient scapegoat for any failures that might occur. Their
persecution was in some ways almost as horrifying as that of the Jews.
But at least it was not justified on false grounds of mysticism or
pseudo-science. Their existence obstructed something which was of
the essence of Communist planning, and they had to submit or be
killed or expelled. The Jews could not even submit; because a false
ideal of race had been erected to cloak the economic and psycho-
logical motives of the regime; they could only suffer at home, while
some few have succeeded in going into exile abroad.
Culture, not "race,'' is, again, the crux of the American problem.
The danger was that the American tradition might not suffice to ab-
sorb the vast body of alien ideas pouring into the country with the
immigrant hosts, that the national melting-pot might fail to perform
its office, and might crack or explode. When immigrants came in
small numbers they could be, and were, absorbed, from whatever
part of Europe they chanced to hail, and in at most two generations
they became an integral part of the American nation. Their Alpine
or Mediterranean elements stood in the way of the process no more
than their previous Czech or Italian nationality. It was the size of
the blocks of alien culture to be assimilated which constituted the
problem.
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